Photo tour: 100 years of IBM, from punch cards to Watson

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Earlier this month, IBM celebrated its 100th birthday. It wasn’t called IBM back in 1911, though: It was lumbered with the high-tech-for-its-time name of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, the result of a merger between four companies, and it wasn’t until after Thomas J. Watson took over that it was renamed to IBM in 1924. For many years, IBM — International Business Machines — focused on producing devices and furthering technologies that had been pioneered by its four constituent companies at the end of the 1800s: tabulating machines, cash registers, punch card readers, and accurate time recording devices. For the first few decades of its existence, IBM even made meat and cheese slicers!

To discuss the complete history of IBM would be a monumental undertaking that is far better handled by IBM’s own website and Wikipedia. Suffice it to say, IBM eventually moved on to electric typewriters and room-sized computers designed for accounting, and then onto personal computers. It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact that IBM and its vast R&D department has made to computer technology, and the world in general. IBM created the first hard drives and memory chips, UPC barcodes, magnetic strips found on credit cards, and more. Really, just have a scroll through the list of areas that IBM has sunk research money into; it had — and has — a finger in almost every tech pie.If you prefer the picture-book approach, though, check out Technology Review’s 100 Years of IBM in Pictures. Technology Review has sourced 11 fantastic, high-resolution photos that depict machines as old as the Dey dial recorder, made in 1880, and the punch card machines used to tabulate American censuses, starting from 1890. There are photos of the first Selectric typewriter, and the IBM guidance computer used by NASA’s Gemini space program. Finally, because no review of IBM’s history would be complete without a mention of its most important invention, there’s a photo of the computer that would quickly become popular enough to lend its name — “PC” — to the billions of computers that followed.